Right at the tail end of March, I took a little trip to Northern California to visit the Pixar offices for an advance look at a still work-in-progress CARS 3 (out June 16).
The group I was with got an extended look at about 40 mostly finished minutes of CARS 3, introduced by director John Fee, who has worked primarily as a storyboard artist on such films as CARS, CARS 2, WALL-E, and RATATOUILLE, but CARS 3 is his first film as a director. He was joined by producer Kevin Reher and co-producer Andrea Warren. (I filed interviews with both Fee and Reher & Warren back in April; take a look at that Right Here.)
A few things I can share with you about CARS 3. Since Lightning McQueen has been at the racing thing a while now, he’s considered old hat, which leaves room for next-gen racer Jackson Storm (voiced by Armie Hammer) to take over as champion of the circuit. To stay in the game and improve his race times, McQueen agrees to enter into a training program designed by Sterling (Nathan Fillion), whose company recently purchase Rust-Eze. There’s talk about legacy, branding, merchandizing, all of which doesn’t really interest McQueen, but he goes along because he wants a chance to train in Sterling’s massive Racing Center, where he meets his trainer, Cruz Ramirez (comic actor Cristela Alonzo), a character whose appeal is clearly going to be a centerpiece to the film’s success.
Although we didn’t see much of it in the footage that was screened, all the regulars from Radiator Springs are back, along with a host of new supporting players including a group of characters known as the Legends, who are based on real-life stockcar greats and voiced by the likes of Chris Cooper, Margo Martindale, Isiah Whitlock Jr., and racing legend Junior Johnson.
Other tidbits we found out include the fact that Randy Newman is returning to do the film’s score; Paul Newman’s Doc Hudson does make an appearance; and there’s a really thrilling demolition derby sequence on a figure-eight track that is going to look tremendous in 3-D (as well as muddy and slightly violent, or as violent as talking-car movies can get). Another interesting thing I noticed (and keep in mind, we didn’t see the whole film yet) is that the events of CARS 2 were not mentioned either in the footage we saw or during any of the presentations or interviews I witnessed. Take that for what it’s worth.
From what we did see, CARS 3 looks to be both unbelievably thrilling, animated with a level of detail I’ve never seen, and a highly emotional ride, especially for McQueen and Cruz. I’m genuinely looking forward to seeing the finished film.
On the day after the footage presentation, we were taken to the Sonoma Raceway (about 45 minutes outside of San Francisco) where we saw more presentations about the various stages of production and a little history of NASCAR racing, while we conducted interviews with some of CARS 3’s key creatives, a remainder of which I’ll share with you today. The teams of Pixar folks featured here are more on the design and animation side of things, and I was genuinely honored to get to meet some of these folks, who rarely come out for junket interviews, but so much of their creative energy and practical knowledge goes into what we see on the screen—everything from creating new characters to deciding how light reflects off a car's surface. Let’s dive in…
First up is effects supervisor Jon Reisch, supervising technical director Michael Fong, and supervising animator Bobby Podesta, all of whom talked about Pixar’s production pipeline and the technical achievements that the artists worked on for CARS 3. Enjoy…
Capone: During your presentation. I’m the one who was exceedingly excited about how this is going to look in 3-D. And you said you’ve seen the muddy demolition derby scene in 3-D?
Jon Reisch: Yes, we have. Just a couple of weeks back, actually. And it does look awesome [laughs].
Capone: I know you say that you don’t think of it in those terms of what would look best in 3-D when you’re coming up with story or with design, but every once in a while it’s cool to get something thrown in your face in a 3-D movie. Overall in terms of technical achievements, technical innovations for this film, things that have never been done before, what are you most proud of?
JR: Michael, I think you should probably take that about the rendering.
Michael Fong: Yeah, there’s going to be a complexity of the world that’s going to be so much better than previous CARS movies. I think we’ve got an increased level of geometry, we’ve got a lot more realistic lighting behavior. I’ve got to tell you, I’ve done a lot of these interviews and when I keep thinking about this, the thing that I’m most excited about is that when you come away from he movie at the end of it all, I swear you’re going to be talking about the story. You’ve only seen 40-some-odd minutes of it. You’re going to be talking about the story. As awesome as Jon’s effects are, as awesome as the acting is, you're going to come back and “Holy, McQueen did…” I think that excites me the most, to be honest.
Capone: I’m actually really excited to see the final film just to notice some of those lighting improvements that you talked about. I noticed it in the racing center. That’s where I said “This is a really complicated glass situation.”
MF: Yeah, our production designer fell in love with glass for that building, then he wanted to put partitions of glass inside the glass building, then some of the partitions have smoked glass. There was a lot of glass [laughs].
Capone: Is this something as simple as a new rendering program?
MF: It started with FINDING DORY, where they changed to this new rendering system, and what it does is path tracing. So you’re actually figuring out how photons are traveling, when they’re hitting a surface, how they bounce, how they send off more samples, how they’re doing that sort of thing. But the thing is that FINDING DORY had a whole totally different set of problems. They were underwater, things weren’t as shiny as they were with us, and then you come to CARS and you’ve got these shiny cars that are reflecting everything, and these glass buildings that for some crazy reason we’re putting in our movie, and you’re encountering new problems and new issues that you want to solve.
The other thing I like to tell people is we also want to lean back toward THE GOOD DINOSAUR, where they had beautiful, rich, lush vegetation. We wanted the world to feel like there’s never-ending vegetation that’s going off into the distance. So we wanted the system to be able to handle millions of blades of grass and millions of leaves on the trees. So we were pushing on those angles.
JR: Totally. For us in effects too, just lighting, all the dust and smoke which you know is going to be a part of a CARS film, because it’s always been a big component of that and really tackling that challenge, which again it wasn’t as important to FINDING DORY’s story. So it was really fertile ground and a new territory for us to push on the render and get it to do what we wanted.
You’ll see sequences where the dust that’s getting kicked up behind the cars and behind a whole field of racing cars, there’s a huge amount of data there, and the way the light interacts with it, the way that it blooms out as it’s backlit, there’s something just beautifully realistic about that that we’ve never been able to capture on the other films. I’m really excited about it. It just goes again to provide that believability and the grounded-ness of the visuals that backs up this very relatable and grounded story from an emotional standpoint.
Capone: In one of the presentations, someone showed us the way workflow happens, with the understanding that story changes can happen at pretty much any point in the process. Do the animators ever go back to story people and say “This isn’t working,” or can you introduce ideas at that point while you’re animating and saying “What do you think of this?” How open are they to that?
Bobby Podesta: Yeah, we do that. We do that all the time. The story evolves. Every stage is actually telling the story, so they’re crafting the story in the through-lines and the arcs and everything in the story department, and that’s evolving once they record the actors and what happens in there, and they cut it together and the story’s evolving, and it gets to layout and how the shots are actually constructed and put together, the story is evolved. Then we’re making acting choices that are evolving the story and changing it.
So it’s not a static thing that is just simply built upon. It’s something that is added to and modified and changed and the shape will change as we go. And then it’s the director who’s really holding that whole thing in their head, so a little change here, a little change here, Brian’s watching how that all adds up, what that whole thing feels like if you zoom out and look at the film as a whole and if you zoom really far in and look at a tiny little choice. To be able to zoom out and zoom in that’s one of the biggest responsibilities if you’re a director.
Then for all of us as supervisors, our job is to be able to do a similar thing for our departments, to be able to say okay I understand why you want to make this animation choice here. Let’s zoom out and make sure it makes sense within all the choices we’re making in this sequence and then in the film and how the arc works like that in terms of the character, and are we changing it through our performance choices? So it’s a constant in and out that we’re doing.
Capone: I know somebody in our session asked about a scene that you guys really fell in love with that ended up getting cut, but what I’m curious about is, do you ever set to work on a scene and figure out as you’re working on it that it probably won’t make the final cut?
BP: It doesn’t often happen like that because we try to figure that out early enough. Because once you get into actually animating a scene or doing effects or whatever, it takes a long time. It’s not to say we don’t cut those or those changes don’t happen. Actually it happens all the time, we just try to do everything we can to make those choices as early as possible.
Capone: In any other line of work, if something you’ve worked on for months gets killed, it would be heartbreaking, but I could almost see how if it was a regular part of the job, you wouldn’t take it personally.
BP: No, this is it. It’s like, you’re a writer and someone said “I need you to get rid of this sentence.” Your whole world doesn’t fall apart because you know the point of what you’re trying to craft. The same thing goes for film, right? Editing is a part of the process to tell the best story that your’e trying to tell, and I think it’s really similar. So we know that’s part of it. If we just came out and said “Here’s an idea,” and we put it up once, we all know that idea will not be as good as if we didn’t iterate on it and we didn’t push back and forth and try to rub ideas against each other so they become sharper, and that’s really how we end up getting to where we are. And we’re open to that. That’s kind of the deal we made.
JR: Even in our individual departments, that’s so engrained in how we work and how we think about the work. You can’t hold it close to the vest. You have to put up you IP work, everybody’s got to see that dirty laundry, because there may be something there that’s really important to learn from. Even if it’s not working for you, it may be that that is a path that you’ve now helped the rest of the team not go down that same road, and maybe on the flip side of it, you’ve got something that’s great and it’s like “Oh man, we’ve got to get that into all these shots, so everybody take a look at this new target that we’re trying to head for.”
Capone: I don’t know how much you worked on this, but there’s a scene where we’re watching an old race film of Doc’s, and I love the treatment you gave that. You have to make a digital process look like film. Talk about that sequence.
JR: Some beautiful, beautiful work by our lighting department who did a lot of that treatment work in Nuke, which is our compositing software. But the guy who was looking at that had a bunch of old Kodachrone reference he was looking at. It’s not only the saturation range and the brightness, but there’s also frame skipping that’s happening in there, some blending, it feels like there’s a little bit of waver in the camera. It’s great, great stuff. It all lends again to this authenticity of this old found footage of Doc that McQueen stashed away in his hat forever.
Capone: It looks like film from an 8mm or 16mm camera. Does that fall to your DP to like come up with the way that’s going to look?
BP: It starts with production design. The production designers will go in and say “Here’s a target. He’s what we’re trying to achieve.” And they’ll work in partnership with the DP of photography and DP of lighting and whatever else it takes.
Capone: So I do want to talk about the demolition derby. For those two characters [McQueen and Cruz], they’re in a horror movie at that moment. It’s dark, there’s fire, there are like weird colors. It might be the actual darkest scene I’ve seen in a CARS movie. Talk about just the look of that scene beyond the mud, the terror that’s on the screen. Where did you get those ideas?
JR: I don’t want to completely speak for our lighting DP, but there’s definitely a theatricality to it, right? It’s not that it’s a horror scene for the rest of the cars that are on the track.
BP: It’s a good Saturday night.
Capone: It’s a family night. But I’m saying for those two characters.
JR: It really is. They’re out of their element. I think some of the lighting direction there really highlights the idea of them feeling super out of their element. There are these spotlights that are chasing them. There’s just so much chaos that’s going on, but it still has to all be controlled to guide your eye to where you need to be looking in the frame, especially because it’s so fast. It cuts really quickly. There’s 170 shots there. There are a lot of lighting changes that happen. When Fritter goes down, the whole audience just gasps. The floodlights come back on just to make sure she’s okay. It’s a really cool, dynamic scene that just adds to the drama that’s happening in that section.
Capone: You mentioned before that you make many of the acting choices. But what percentage of that is looking at the actor while they’re recording the voice verses making the decisions you would as an animator without that reference?
BP: We do a lot of reference in terms of what the actors did, what the performance is, we look at all the voices being recorded. We have video of that. We try to pull things we can. But we’re cooking with a lot of different sources, which is great, because we have what the character is in design of that, we have the actor’s vocal performance and maybe what they did [physically], we have whatever we’re bringing to it ourselves, and we’re trying to craft something that’s unique. It’s this culmination of all these things working together. And when that works, that’s great. So McQueen is a little bit of Owen, he’s a little bit of the animator, he’s a little bit of the design. That’s what we’re shooting for.
Capone: Guys, the presentation was really enlightening, for sure. Thank you so much.
JR: Thanks for spending time with us.
Finally, we have members of the design team, who were charged with creating and bringing to life all of the new characters in CARS 3, including Jackson Strom and Cruz Ramirez. In this group, we have directing animator Jude Brownbill, production designer Jay Shuster, and characters supervisor Michael Comet. Ready, set, go…
Capone: Which of the many design achievements that you did this time around are you most proud of?
Jay Shuster: From my perspective, I feel like having been responsible for the characters was just getting as many characters up on screen as we did. The variety and the pure, rich texture of how many different characters are up on screen is phenomenal in the time that we had to do it.
Jude Brownbill: I’m proud of the fact that we have a lot of new characters, but with each of them, we could have just put the same mouth shapes on all of them, the same lip shapes on all of them, but we really had the time and we took the time to try and figure out how we could support their uniqueness with their mouths and their lips. For McQueen originally to Cruz, Storm, Fritter, Sterling, all of their mouths are different, and we treated the way they look from an animation standpoint very differently for each one.
Capone: You mentioned something about the headlights that you did differently? Can you explain that?
Michael Comet: Sure. For CARS 3, because of the way the new rendering system works, when light goes into a piece of glass, we want it to behave like it really would, and the software is going to do that. So we have to actually model the lens over the headlight and then we also have to go in and put a reflector and make a chrome reflective object inside of that, and we also generally try to put a bulb in there as well. The shading artists also have ways to add bump or displacement so it looks like maybe on the older cars, like the Legends, you’ll see that bumpy-looking glass. But we had to actually go into all the old cars and upgrade their lights just to have that detail in there so it looks right.
Capone: Of the new characters that you designed, which one was the toughest to nail down and get to that final version?
JS: I think Cruz, because I like to say over the course of four years she evolved greatly. Like you heard in other presentations, she started life as a male character, so just that transition right there is huge, but we did that because it served the story better, then sorting out who she was and her personality traits and how that translates through to shapes and even her paint. That was a solid four-year chunk of time.
MC: Yeah, and I think it’s like that design quality, trying to fit her between McQueen and Storm, making her have that American muscle mixed with that European styling and really ironing that out. Everything from the detail of her headlights and how that looks and how that works, and making her look appealing was a real challenge.
Capone: Her yellow coloring, that seems like it was decided fairly early on. I wondered why you made her yellow. And I thought “That’s not really a dominant color in this universe yet.” There isn’t a yellow character, gold, or whatever she is.
JS: Well, I think it was partially because a lot of the drawings we put up for Brian to direct us on were yellow. It was a random choice on my part, but it just was yellow. As well we held her up to the entire population of CARS characters, We were like “Wow there is no yellow, and it really makes her pop even more and stand out.” So it really worked in our favor strangely randomly.
JB: Yeah, and it works well because she is super positive, super bright, super bubbly, big personality and it just fits.
Capone: You just threw up the slide for two seconds, I don’t know if anyone saw it, that her eyes color is something called “brown iris.” Is that Cristela’s eye color too?
MC: It is. So that little square on the slide was Cristela’s eye that we referenced.
JS: Owen Wilson too; that’s why McQueen’s eyes are blue. We generally try to match the eye color to the person.
JB: She has also her emblem on the back, that CRS logo. The number plate for each character is usually their initials or their date of birth. Something significant for that character.
Capone: I love that for Storm, the S logo is a variation of the hurricane symbol. I think you said that he’s a weapon on wheels. I love that idea that there’s an element of danger to him. I noticed right away that he’s all angles, and Lightning is all soft curves.
MC: Even Storm’s butt, it’s a point. It’s like you can’t approach this guy from either the front or the rear without getting hurt. [laughs]
Capone: We were told by somebody else today that there was a period in Nascar history that the scariest cars were black, and he’s predominately black. Did you do it for that reason?
MC: Absolutely. At one point, he was all at carbon fiber, and we thought that’s too high-tech for Nascar. We pulled him back and just made him this deep metallic black with that hurricane S breaking up the rear portion with a different tone. It all feeds into him being that Dark Knight kind of character.
Capone: Is there a glowing feature to him, or is that just the color blue?
JS: There is. Yeah, that’s definitely part of the shading. It makes him even stand out a little bit more from the rest of the next gens that some of his details actually emit light, iridescent. That hurricane shape actually, we have a very special set of controls for lighting that can basically make that shine and react as he drives by as well.
MC: We wanted it to be like snake skin and have this opalescent sheen across it.
Capone: You also mentioned you designed the shape of his eyes differently?
MC: The eye lids.
JB: Yeah, the posing of his eye lids and his mouth to try and reflect the angularity of his body, instead of having a nice swooping McQueen-like mouth, trying to reflect those lines and have these angular mouth shapes and lid shapes and make him look a little bit more intimidating.
Capone: When I watch the final film, I definitely will be looking at mouths more than I think I ever have in any animated film. Did you have a similar process for some of the Legends characters?
JS: Oh yeah, absolutely. The research on them was deep, but not as wide a net as say a Storm or a Cruz, where we’re compositing a lot of different models distilling down to one. Of course, we were basing the legends off a ’39 Ford or a ’51 Nash or whatever. So we had a lot more going for us. Just look up that body style, start to Car-ify it where we change the proportions, do what we do when we bring any kind of real car into the world.
MC: From the design process, we go into modeling straight away. That process is very similar. So going in and iterating. Like you said, what’s cool with those is they’re basically based on more realistic cars. So we can look at that for reference and help to guide us. But even there, especially with the mouths, there are actually a lot of challenges with the Legends with their grills. A lot of the classic cars have these dominant feature in the front, and that’s right where you want to put the mouth, so figuring out how to integrate that and make that work was a challenge. For example, on I think it was Junior, his mouth, even though the radiator goes this way, we had to flatten it out so we could put a mouth in front so the mouth isn’t like—
JS: A beak.
MC: A beak, exactly. So it’s back and forth with that part and figuring out how the design is going to work with what was a real car and how to Car-ify it.
Capone: You made some of the grills mustaches, I noticed.
MC: [laughs] Yeah, that’s the easier case.
JB: With Smokey’s mouth, in animation the mouth was down here, but we found that if we pushed the mouth up and had his mustache grill so you could just see the bottom of his lip, it made it harder to animate him smiling, but it also made it a little more interesting so we could just see the bottom of his lip.
MC: Kind of like Sheriff was designed.
Capone: Once your designs have gone on to the animators, how often do they come back to you and say “Can you make this a little more maneuverable?”
JS: Depends on the film. We spend a good deal of time upfront in those conversations, so that before it gets even officially into shots, a lot of that’s been ironed out.
JB: We’re doing our character tests while they’re still articulating it, so we can say “Can we push this a little more so we don’t get a crease here?” There’s a lot of back and forth between the two departments.
JS: I think with the hero characters, that happens a fair bit. That’s part of making the hero character stand out and be unique and robust.
Capone: I know there’s a scene here where Lightning gets a new wrap. Did you have anything to do with that, or was that strictly an animating thing? Did anything change about the way that he looked or moved?
JS: The wrap being applied was definitely like character-model mixed with an effect or simulation department, so really the simulation department handled a lot of how that got applied, but the look of it was all character department and working with the art department figuring that out.
MC: Yeah, the graphics team. The graphic’s flat, and someone else down the line had to figure out how it actually wraps to the form.
Capone: I want ask about Sterling, because I don’t think we’re supposed to entirely know right away which way we’re going to think about him. What was the overall perception of how you put him together?
JS: Well, he started life as kind of a different character.
MC: He’s supposed to be that business man, even in his design, like his cufflinks, the emblems on the side are like the cufflinks of his suit.
JS: I guess maybe not so different. Brian’s original pitch was this is the millionaire who will still have a beer with you at the end of the day and still talk shop with you. He’s one of the people, but he wears really nice suits. We referenced some of the characters from “Mad Men,” how dialed those suits are and pressed and then with just little accents of the handkerchief or cufflink, and you see that in the little touches of chrome on him and how taught his features are.
JB: And because he was a businessman in a suit, he doesn’t want to crinkle his suit, so we made sure we didn’t move him too much. We didn’t want to be moving him out. He’s very sophisticated, very crisp. We even looked at Nathan Fillion’s mouth and got some of that a-symmetry in there as well.
Capone: Thank you so much. It was great to meet you.
